Glory Days at Myanmar School Clouded

YANGON—Kyi May Kaung remembers the glory days of the University of Yangon, once one of Asia’s best-known colleges.

One of her history professors in the early 1960s used to appear in class pretending to be famous historical figures like Robespierre. Students hung out at poetry readings. Teachers held degrees from places such as Harvard and M.I.T. and prestigious schools in the United Kingdom.

But when the military regime took over in Myanmar, also known as Burma, in 1962, dark days began. After Ms. Kyi May Kaung became an assistant lecturer in economics at the school, then known as Rangoon University, the government placed a military intelligence officer in her classes to supervise. Professors were ordered to stop teaching political science and instead lectured on the “socialist experience” in the Soviet Union. Funding grew so scarce that teachers had to borrow light bulbs to ensure there was enough light during storms.

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“I started to realize something was very, very wrong,” said the 69-year-old Ms. Kyi May Kaung, who left the university—and Myanmar—in 1982 and now works as a Washington-based writer.

Associated Press

The entrance gate of Yangon University in Myanmar.

Today, the school that taught many of Myanmar’s most famous dissidents, intellectuals and even some of its former military leaders, is a shadow of its former self, mainly serving a few graduate students. Most students were long ago scattered to departments far from the main campus or other universities. Many buildings are empty, while the paint chips away.

Ronald Findlay, a prominent economics professor at Columbia University who studied and taught at Rangoon University in the 1950s and 1960s, said he was dismayed when he went back to visit the school—and especially his former two-story residence there—after more than four decades in the U.S.

“It was beautiful housing, and we thought surely somebody must be living there,” he said. “But it was a jungle. There was nobody living there—it was abandoned. It made you cry, it was awful.”

Talk of restoring the university has picked up in recent months, as Myanmar continues a reform process that has included the release of political prisoners and the end of most Western economic sanctions. But fully restoring the school would require major investments and a willingness to allow students to begin congregating in groups and debate political issues again, educators say.

Government officials have said they are interested in re-establishing the school but that it’s too early to provide details.

Built up by British colonial administrators in the 1920s and beyond, the university became a hub for intellectuals in the region—including many of the young revolutionaries who led opposition to British rule. Aung San, the country’s main independence leader in the 1940s whose daughter Aung San Suu Kyi is now Myanmar’s famous opposition leader, once edited the student union magazine, while Ne Win, the brutal dictator who took over in 1962, also studied there.

When students launched protests soon after Ne Win assumed power, the military blew up the Student Union building and tightened control over classes. Student demonstrations also broke out in 1974, with soldiers once again storming the campus.

After further student protests in 1988, military leaders expanded efforts to dismantle the university, including moving more students to far-flung locations and setting up alternative schools on the outskirts of Myanmar’s cities. It repeatedly kept the university closed for long stretches.

Talk of restoration picked up earlier this year after a well-known economist and presidential advisor, U Myint, circulated an “Open Letter on Restoring the University of Yangon to its Former Glory.”

In the letter, he recalled his days as a student and how he spent time at the Student Union, which had a reading room, a barber shop and a ping-pong table. A new Student Union, he said, should also include a ping pong table, as well as a beauty parlor and guests rooms for visiting scholars.

More importantly, rebuilding the Student Union would be a “landmark” towards national reconciliation, he wrote, underscoring the government’s commitment to letting students gather and exchange ideas. A government advisor was subsequently quoted in a Myanmar exile publication saying the letter did not represent the views of the president’s office.

Such talk of restoring the Student Union is “risky” despite the latest reform efforts in Myanmar, Dr. Findlay said, given the sensitivities that still revolve around letting students organize.

“Just imagine if there’s a Student Union building, and you have thousands of people hanging out together, suppose they say they don’t want 25% of the seats [in parliament] reserved for the military, what are they going to do?” he said, referring to a rule in Myanmar that automatically awards soldiers a quarter of parliament’s seats. “It’s not easy.”

Mr. Nay Zin Latt, an advisor to President Thein Sein, said that “being a democratic society, the government has the idea too to see the Student Union [rebuilt], in an appropriate time,” but he didn’t provide details.

Mr. U Myint declined to comment by email but referred to a recent paper in which he wrote that he feels “deep appreciation to those who say the education system at present is in an awful mess and it needs to be fixed” and added, “it will require a lot of dedication, cooperation and support from all of us to overhaul and fix the system.”

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Indonesia Real Time provides analysis and insight into the region, which includes Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and Brunei. Contact the editors at SEAsia@wsj.com.

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